minoanmiss: A spiral detail from a Minoan fresco (Minoan Spiral)
minoanmiss ([personal profile] minoanmiss) wrote in [community profile] agonyaunt2021-08-11 12:08 pm

Dear Prudence: My POC Friends Say Being Interested in My Irish Heritage Is a Dog Whistle.



I’m a third-generation American. All four of my grandparents were born in Ireland and moved here as young kids. According to my parents, when my great-grandparents moved here, they moved to an area with little to no Irish community and had to assimilate pretty quickly. They changed their names to something more American, cooked only American foods, etc. Obviously, nowadays, Irish last names are very common in the U.S.

When I was growing up, I really didn’t know anything about Irish American culture because my grandparents didn’t like to talk about it much. Now I’m an adult and I live in a very heavily populated Irish American area. About a year ago I started to get more interested in the culture and wanted to research it a bit more. This basically consisted of me reading a few books about the history of Irish Americans, making a few new recipes, and learning about the origins of my family’s original names.


I didn’t really think it was a big deal until I mentioned it in passing to my group of friends. To my surprise, my POC friends got upset, saying that Irish Americans have no culture and that it was just a dog whistle to become interested in Irish history. I would never, ever suggest that Irish Americans had it worse than Black Americans or anything like that; I was simply trying to learn about my ancestry.

My first thought was to write them off, but now I’m worried that I am somehow signaling racism. Am I doing something wrong?


A: Not at all. If you ask me, reading history books and making a little corned beef and cabbage sounds like the ideal way to get excited about your heritage. We’d be so much better off if more white people chose this route instead of, say, waving a Confederate flag, railing against the 1619 Project, or trying to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools. It sounds to me like either something’s missing from this story or there was a big misunderstanding that might be cleared up by another talk about what you’re doing and why. If these people are truly mad at you for researching your family’s history, you may need new friends.

And a comment:

Q. Re: Accidental racist: The only thing I can think of that would precipitate this response is if the writer either has brought up the “Irish were slaves” myth, conflated “Irish need not apply” with racism toward BIPOC people, or their friends think that’s where they’re heading. The writer may want to interrogate if they’re using their heritage to feel better about their role in white supremacy. (I say this as someone who is part Irish, and feels the most comfortable about exploring that because it is the least oppressive of my cultural heritages. But y’know, I’m still white with everything that means.)

A: If the letter writer brought this up, they left out a big part of the story; none of it falls under research on family history, recipes, or names. But letter writer, if any of this feels familiar, give it some thought.
cereta: (Reds Dreamwidth)

[personal profile] cereta 2021-08-12 12:48 am (UTC)(link)
Am I allowed to be confuzzled by the idea that people in the U.S. of European extraction who have no real identification with a European culture have no culture? My (adoptive) family is like eight different kinds of European, and the most recent immigration was in the 1860's. Most of my family got here before the Revolutionary War. Other than being German in the same way that everyone in Cincinnati is German, our heritage is pretty much just "white U.S." We'd be WASPs except that we're Catholic.

But that's not "no culture." My culture is baseball and superhero comics and hamburgers and the 4th of July. My culture is also southern Ohio, which means shades of Kentucky and West Virginia (my bio family is mostly from WV). It's gliding short a's, so that "can" and "cabagge" sound different from "cat." It's a slight twang when we get in our cups, and never saying "y'all" in Cincinnati but definitely saying it elsewhere. It's saying, "please?" to mean, "sorry, could you repeat that?" It's U.S. Catholicism and "Hail Mary" in Latin. It's a culture.
cereta: (Literary Fangirl)

[personal profile] cereta 2021-08-12 02:24 am (UTC)(link)
Yah. It's kind of like people with flat MidWestern accents saying they have no accent. Um, yeah, ya do; it's just the one we've labeled as the default.
shirou: (cloud)

[personal profile] shirou 2021-08-12 07:13 pm (UTC)(link)
I was born in the US to a family that immigrated from the Netherlands. I grew up speaking Dutch, spending my summers in the Netherlands, and practicing Dutch traditions. Most of my family is Dutch. Nobody questioned my Dutch identity, and indeed I never made a conscious decision to claim one: It was just part of who I was—and am.

Nevertheless, I identify primarily as American, especially now that I'm an adult. (It was a little different when I was a child, when I had a harder time fitting into a Southern American culture that existed immediately outside my house but not inside it.) Maybe it's in part because I've spent enough time in NL and know enough Dutch people to understand how I'm culturally different. But it's also because, for all its faults, I see a lot of richness in American culture that I'm happy to claim as my own.
cereta: (foodporn)

[personal profile] cereta 2021-08-12 08:07 pm (UTC)(link)
See, that's also something interesting. Certain parts of the U.S. are said to have "cultures." The South that can be loosely defined as the ex-Confederacy, the southwest (especially Texas), California (which most people overgeneralize as SoCal), certain cities (New York, Boston, even Chicago to a lesser extent). But tell someone you're from Ohio (or even Cincinnati) or east central Illinois, and it's just assumed there's no there there. Not just that people don't know the specifics of Cincinnati's quite interesting culture, but that they assume that culture doesn't even exist.